


Anna in the Jungle

by seekingferret



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 13:41:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The theatre is an empty box and it is our job to fill it with fury and ecstasy and revolution."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anna in the Jungle

Part I - Guns and Roses

She'd never imagined that she would ever learn how to repair an AK in a fire zone, but she's not surprised that she's good at it. When she can hold her emotions in check, she's good at everything. Tolerating Geoffrey, answering phone messages from angry subscribers, running a theater festival while everyone else pretends to be in charge, all of these are excellent practice for waging war against a corrupt South American dictator.

Come evening she puts on her makeup and imagines she's Ellen in her dressing room, only her makeup is green and black facepaint made by crushing a certain Peruvian herb and dissolving it in tree oil. And her costume is a green worksuit stolen from the Peruvian army. It was designed for a soldier who weighed about thirty kilos more than her. It does whatever the opposite of flattering her curves is, but she wears it professionally, or as professionally as you can when the belt holding up your pants is trying to squeeze you in two.

It's not really a costume, come to think of it. At first, there was a certain amount of playacting involved, pretending to be strong, pretending to be unafraid, pretending to know how to ambush government forces by the river basin. She's not Anna anymore. Now she's la Norteña Reina del Rio, the Northern River Queen, and the patter of her automatic rifle strikes fear into the hearts of hardened murderers. It's not a costume anymore. This is who she has become.

She came down to follow a man, but since she's been here a stream of men and women have joined her in her hut, a libertine existence that makes Richard's life in Toronto seem... Roman Catholic. They make love beside guns and roses. Then they collapse into the straw and dream of a future of freedom for all mankind. Then they wake up and they fight to make it a dream no more.

Her muscles are hard and limber now. When she first got here, she couldn't raise her tent on her own. Sand slips through the neck of the great hourglass and etches a new person onto her body, grain by grain. In some ways she is sad for the things she has lost. She cannot afford to look back.

 

Part II Till Birnam Wood

Among the things she has kept from her life in Canada, the most treasured is the copy of the Bard's complete works she stole from the festival when she left. Well, it's not really stealing when the artistic director tells you to do it, but Geoffrey had made her feel like it was a theft, so it counted. It was the last time she ever performed a licit act in an illicit way to get a cheap thrill. She doesn't have any need for cheap thrills down here. 

Sometimes she'll read Coriolanus by candlelight and wonder if Shakespeare himself knew the difference between a good leader and an evil one. She can hear in her head all of the old familiar voices telling her what they think: Darren insisting that Shakespeare is dead and Coriolanus a moron; Geoffrey declaiming about how the play isn't about power, it's about maternal love; Nahum murmuring about the power of a mob. She was surprised when she found out that she no longer cared what the voices said. She reads Shakespeare's beautiful words and knows deep in her heart that Coriolanus is sincere, a fighter for peace. She's telling her own story now.

Staff meetings, always her least favorite part of any job, take place around the bamboo table in her hut. She'll spread maps yellowed and crinkling with jungle humidity on the table and jam pins in them to mark places she wants to burn with her righteous fury. Then Pedro, who used to be an oil engineer, and Martino, who worked on a coffee farm, and Antonio, who was called Hu-Jin when he worked at a semiconductor manufacturer in Osaka, argue with her about tactics for what feels like hours. She always gets the final word. In that way too she is like Coriolanus.

She is not too old to go out in the field with the men and women who serve at her command. Her squad in lampblack and green canvas sneaks among the trees as if they were a part of the forest. They sneak past guardposts like the night itself. They are death on eight legs, Black Widow Squad, though only one of her fighters is female. She is woman enough for four.

 

Part III The People's Consul

She likes to pretend that she's in charge of the rebels, even though she's not really. They practice a cell structure, so nobody knows too much information about the other cells. She's just in charge of a cell. Fourteen ragged freedom fighters most of the time, though Jose goes home for the harvests and sometimes a couple of teenagers skip school to train with them. She's not a babysitter, but she finds they raise the spirits of her fighters so she lets them keep coming by as long as they're in no real danger. They're not allowed to hold a gun when there are no adults around, and when she caught Ramon smoking a stolen cigarette she had him beaten with a bamboo cane until he swore he wouldn't do it again.

She likes to pretend she's sleeping with the leader of the rebels, though El Trompeto isn't the leader of the rebels and anyway, they're not really sleeping together. They just fucked once, when she first came down to Bolivia and started to make a name for herself. For him it was a dominance thing, all male machismo and no finesse. For her, it was about being in over her head on an adventure and needing a warm body to throw herself against until it stops hurting. It worked, and then she stopped doing it.

She likes to pretend it's just theater, sometimes. She was never an actor, but she worked among actors and has developed some of their sense of overblown drama. She'll never be an Ellen (Dear Lord, Ellen, there's no way she'd last a minute out here before charging straight at a federale with an M16.), but she does sometimes get caught up in the fact that here she is, former administrative assistant of a theater festival waging war against a corrupt government. It's like somehow she got caught in a movie. Or maybe a TV show. The best drama these days is on television, not the cinema, everyone was saying back in liberal Ottawa before she left it behind. Anna knows it's broken that she's done her self-actualization at the expense of these people who are fighting for the right to grow crops that will feed them instead of hungry Europeans. At a certain point she stopped caring about that, too. The one really important thing that she learned at the Festival was to fully commit yourself to being a part of the community. This isn't about her self-actualization. It's about the Bolivian people.

It took her a while to realize that, though. When she's honest with herself- and being honest with herself is another one of the things she had to self-actualize in Bolivia- she came down to Bolivia to live out a liberal fantasy, living off the land, fighting for justice, doing something that had meaning instead of fruitlessly chasing her own tail at the Festival. And since that's pretty much what did happen, it took her a while to realize that the reason why she was doing it mattered, too. They could tell that she was there because she thought they were poorer, less fortunate, less advantaged than her. When she started being there because she loved the people and loved the land, they could tell that, too, and they responded to it. That was when they started calling her la Norteña Reina del Rio instead of what they'd called her before that. La Puta Norteña. 

Now she was the one calling her squadmates putas when they failed to maintain proper discipline. Things changed when you were willing to change with them.

 

Part IV Planning the Next Season

At a certain point she realizes that if it were really about tactics and military logistics, El Trompeto would have made Pedro the leader of their cell. She's good, and she's too smart and honest with herself now to pretend otherwise, but she's not as good as he would be. For a day or so after she realizes this, she sulks, thinking that the rebel leader made the decision with his dick instead of his brain. She doesn't want to put her squad at risk because she slept with the commander. But then she thinks about it some more, and she realizes that there's more to a successful rebellion than fighting. Someday soon the dictator will fall and the rebels will need to form a government. When that happens, Pedro will go back to his job at Chevron and Antonio will go back to his job at Intel, and Anna? Anna will go to La Paz to help run a country. El Trompeto has made a bet on her self-actualization. That's why he chose her to run the cell. When she figures this out, she stops sulking. 

The next time they raid a market for food, she slips a couple notebooks into her bag. In those notebooks she drafts constitutions, organizational charts, economic recovery plans. She doesn't know the first thing about running a country, but she doesn't let that stop her. It can't possibly be more difficult than managing Geoffrey and Oliver and Richard. Someday her people will triumph and her notebooks will help guide them all to liberty and peace and happiness. 

She knows this, too, is a liberal fantasy. It will not be easy and they are not guaranteed to win just because they are right. She takes her fantasy with her when she falls asleep, but when she's awake her mind is on her battles. She fights two wars at once, the war of the moment and the war of the future. And she keeps that in perspective. She thinks of Holly and Geoffrey and their petty power struggle in Geoffrey's first year. Geoffrey was obsessed with winning the battle at hand, and he almost forgot to fight the next war. Mother Courage? At New Burbage? She loves Geoffrey, but she never could figure out what he was thinking. But Holly was willing to sacrifice the war of the moment for the ultimate victory of her theme park, and that was why she got outmaneuvered by Geoffrey's artistic triumph. Win the war at hand, then fight the war of the future. But plan for the war of the future ahead of time. The Festival was just like war, in that way at least.

What was it Hamlet had said, as he struggled toward his fateful conclusion? Time is out of joint. Anna may die in a blaze of glory, and her notebooks will lie useless in a forgotten Bolivian hovel. Or they may capture the capital, Anna standing shoulder to shoulder with Pedro and El Trompeto and all the rest of her new family, and struggle to fight the next war, the war that comes after happily ever after. Or maybe she'll quit, give up the delusion of self-actualization and limp back to Ontario and the comfort of a warm bed and canned soup. She doesn't know the end of her story, cannot know which of the branching paths she will walk down.

She doesn't even know if she is living a comedy or a tragedy or a history.


End file.
